I’m a long time IBM PS/2 keyboard fan, I fell in love with the IBM PS/2 mechanical keyboard back in the 1990s and still use it today as a measure of what a good keyboard should feel like and how it should respond to my large (clumsy) hands. Overtime all mice and keyboards start to break down, so this last week I ordered a Cooler Master MasterKeys Pro S mechanical keyboard. I was looking for a minimalist keyboard without the number pad that utilized Cherry MX Brown Switches in the design and this model fit the bill.

I chose the smaller keyboard layout because I was trying to recover some desk space and cut down on the distance I need to move my hand between the keyboard and mouse – keyboard shortcuts really help improve your efficiency but eventually you’ll need to grab the mouse.

The keyboard itself it actually quite heavy, you could really hurt someone by throwing this keyboard at them. While I’ve only used it for about 2 days now I really like the feel and the actual keys aren’t too loud. It seems like a good balance between performance and noise. What I wasn’t really prepared for was the LED functionality of the keyboard itself. While showing it off in the office, a co-worker figured out how to cycle through all the different LED color combinations. If you wanted too you could easily hang this keyboard on your Christmas tree it’s that colorful and entertaining.

Now, how can I get one of these at each of the three different desks I sit at throughout the week?

It’s pretty funny how I actually find these posts pretty entertaining to myself… going back and looking at all the desktop upgrades I’ve gone through over the years.

In any case I thought it was high past time to give Windows 10 a spin so I went out and purchased a 512GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD. I did this so I could clone my 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD, providing me a very simple backout plan if I didn’t like Windows 10 or something went terribly wrong. I fired up Clonzilla Live via a USB flash drive and quickly cloned the 256GB SSD to the 512GB SSD. I installed the 512GB SSD and put the 256GB SSD in a safe pace. The computer booted up to Windows 7 fine on the new SSD and I upgraded to Windows 10 with no problems or issues. Fast forward almost four months later and I’m pretty happy with the upgrade. I’m not sure I gained a whole lot from a technical standpoint. Windows 7 had worked pretty well for me the past few years and I suspect Windows 10 will do the same but if the upgrade hadn’t been free I’m not sure I would have made the jump myself. About four weeks ago I upgraded my Lenovo T430 to Windows 10 without issue. It helps that I replaced the hard drive with an SSD about a year ago.

Windows 10 is a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users until July 29, 2016 so time is running short.

As you can imagine there are a large number of computers in my house and like most households we’ve had more than our fair share of hard drive failures so backing up our files (and pictures) has become an important task. About 18 months ago I setup CrashPlan (now called CrashPlan for Home) to backup my desktop computer and my wife’s to a third hard drive connected to my primary desktop. It’s been working great for the past 18 months or so until this morning when I received two emails from Code42, the makers of CrashPlan, advising that neither computer had been backed up in 3 days. I restarted both computers and found that CrashPlan had lost my user credentials on my primary desktop the destination device. I provided my credentials to the CrashPlan application but then I was left with a “waiting for network connection” error on both the source and destination computers. I launched the CrashPlan application on the source and found two destinations with the same computer name, one marked green (online) and one marked grey (offline). I had to select the computer marked green to get the backups to start running. I then had to deactivate the offline computer to remove it from the list.

It’s been a while since I upgraded my primary desktop machine so I thought it was time to spend a little coin. While I did install a SSD back in August 2012 I thought it was time for a completely new machine. When I get a new machine I usually pass my old one down to the wife and then her old machine to the kids and so on this way everyone has a little something to be excited about. This time around I decided to splurge and go for what I would probably consider a fairly high-end build. I also ordered a new case and power supply so I could have both machines running at the same time and could take my time migrating the data and content from the old machine to the new machine.

I thought about going with water cooling but eventually decided to stick with air cooling and purchased the Zalman CNPS9900ALED .The Zalman heatsink is insanely huge, words just don’t do it justice. While the Antec P280 case is fairly large itself, the Zalman heatsink quickly fills the case making it look small. Thankfully everything arrived within a few days of ordering it and it took me about 2 days to assemble the new machine. I performed the assembly in the following order;

The hardest part was figuring out how to mount the Zalman CPU heatsink which probably took about 20-35 minutes. Thankfully everything was working right out of the box and I had no DoAs or RMAs to contend with. Obviously I stayed with Windows 7 64-bit having heard all about the issues with Windows 8.

It was that time again for yet another upgrade to the old home desktop.

There’s been quite a few desktop upgrades in the time I’ve been blogging. The first was back in October of 2007, then again in December 2007 I added some accessories, in January 2008 I had a hard disk die, in December of 2008 I replaced the motherboard and CPU, in July 2010 I upgraded to Windows 7 64bit leaving Windows Vista behind, and most recently in October 2011 I upgraded my video card and replaced a dying power supply.

While I was potentially looking at building an entirely new desktop (Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz) I decided to hold off for now and instead take the leap into SSDs, replacing my trusty Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM with a SAMSUNG 830 Series MZ-7PC128D/AM 2.5″ 128GB SATA III MLC Internal SSD.

The choir of migrating the data was pretty painless although it did take quite sometime to run through the backups (you always make backups just in case) and then copy the partitions using Norton Ghost. When all the bits were done moving around I just unplugged the Raptor and plugged in the Samsung. Windows 7 booted right up and announced it had discovered new hardware and asked me to reboot. That was it… my desktop went from taking about 100-120 seconds to boot to taking about 30 seconds to boot.

I’ll give credit to NewEgg once again… they shipped in one day from New Jersey to Pennsylvania.